No antidote to Panama

But the heavens did not fall. That is, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not disqualified. And justice, in a sense, was delayed. Yet the Supreme Court verdict in the Panama case on Thursday   was historic – as promised. It has the potential of changing Pakistan’s political landscape.

Since we have heard and read all about it – in fact, bombarded with it ceaselessly – I need not repeat the gist of the judgment. However, it is rather exceptional that both the parties – the petitioners and the respondents – have celebrated it. There have been wars, for that matter, in which the contenders had declared their victories.

In the case of Thursday’s     verdict, a new offensive is to be launched by the opposition, demanding the prime minister’s resignation and rejecting the proposed formation of a joint investigation team (JIT) to probe specific allegations of financial irregularities and money laundering. Hence, this is going to be a long, hot summer.

This also means that the opportunity for a pause to patiently review the verdict and understand its implications has been rejected. The nation, already exhausted, will not have any respite from a high-pitched political confrontation. Thanks to Imran Khan’s penchant for ‘dharna’ politics that is greedily lapped up by the news channels, this seems to be business as usual.

We may recall how the tempo rose with the release of the Panama Papers in the first week of April last year when members of the prime minister’s family featured in the records as the owners of offshore companies. Since it was a giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records, there was a global outrage over a system that allowed wealth acquired through crime, corruption or wrongdoing to be hidden in secret accounts.

Of course, many Pakistanis were named in the Panama Papers, including politicians, businessmen and bankers. The list included a serving high court judge and a retired judge. There was a particular focus on properties owned in London by the prime minister’s family.   Thursday’s     verdict was the outcome of petitions heard by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa. These petitions, seeking the prime minister’s disqualification, were filed by PTI chief Imran Khan, JI chief Sirajul Haq and AML leader Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed.

There is no doubt that this was a case of historic significance and it did merit extensive coverage. But the main assertion of this column is that it need not have become such a spectacle. It has distracted the media from an appropriate coverage of many crucial issues and developments. Simultaneously, the ruling party has remained too engrossed in Panama-related political wrangling.

What’s more, Thursday’s     verdict has not given us a sense of closure. In fact, it has triggered a political storm. A weakened Nawaz Sharif has now to confront a more determined opposition. We can be sure that this political turmoil will dominate the media in the days to come and cause a lot of confusion in the minds of ordinary citizens who, even otherwise, are not well-informed about problems that directly affect their existence.

Incidentally, in his additional note in the judgment, Justice Azmat Saeed Sheikh has criticised the debate about Panama in the media and the public and has termed it as “ill-informed and misguided”. He added: “Some of [the] attention unfortunately is contaminated with factually incorrect opinions, legally fallacious concepts and predicted decisions, which are bounced around on the airwaves every evening. The temptation to restrain such media coverage is resisted”.

With these profound observations, Justice Sheikh has also said that restricting comments on the court proceedings will perhaps negate the very concept of an open court. But one wonders if the Supreme Court had no role to play in taming the media circus. It served the media’s purpose that the case continued for a long period. It lasted four months and three days, with 36 hearings. Then the judgment was reserved for 57 days.

After every hearing, the stalwarts of the contending parties – the PML-N and the PTI – would stage their show, incited by the live coverage of their antics by all the news channels. Later, the talk shows would pick up the acrimonious debate. But it all amounted to going round in circles without reaching any conclusions. For many discerning viewers, the entire drill was nauseating. But it set the mood and the sense of the overall media coverage.

In the midst of all this noise and edginess, we have the gift of a judgment that needs to be carefully studied. Included in the 548-page document is the 192-page dissenting judgment by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa. Its allusion to a quotation from The Godfather has been highlighted in separate reports and I am tempted to copy the opening of Justice Khosa’s scholarly composition.

Here it goes: “The popular 1969 novel ‘The Godfather’ by Mario Puzo recounted the violent tale of a Mafia family and the epigraph selected by the author was fascinating: ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime’ – Balzac. The novel was a popular sensation which was made into an acclaimed film. It is believed that this epigraph was inspired by a sentence that was written by Honore de Balzac and its original version in French reads as follows…”

On the subject of setting a dangerous precedent by a court of law, Justice Khosa wrote: “I am also reminded of the old bard William Shakespeare” and quoted two lines from ‘Merchant of Venice’. The lines are: “Wrest once the law to your authority. / To do a great right do a little wrong”. However, he explained that he was not wresting the law to his authority and “no little wrong is to be done by me to do a great right in the matter of issuing a declaration against respondent No 1 (Nawaz Sharif)” because the original jurisdiction of the court has already been exercised by the court in such matters where disqualification was involved.

Take this as an aside. There are more concerns about the passions that are being aroused in our post-Panama verdict Pakistan. It is quite like living in a post-truth world – a world in which objective reality is not as important as one’s subjective interpretation of it.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com